Year LXIII, 2021, Single Issue, Page 43

EUROPE AND AFRICA IN THE FACE OF CHANGE

The world, as part of a radical process of change and redefinition, is currently undergoing a rapid and profound structural transformation that is altering both the distribution of political power and international balances. 

The phenomena responsible for triggering this change, or which characterise it, fall into three main categories: i) social and demographic; ii) economic; iii) political and institutional. Of course, the value of categorising processes of change in this way is purely analytical, as doing so can help us to understand the issues at hand. In reality, however, these three categories are not just strictly interdependent, but also closely intertwined.

The World Population Prospects 2019 research report, prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, contains estimates and projections useful for evaluating the social and demographic trends that will characterise the evolution of the world over the coming decades. It highlights dynamics that need to be taken into account in order to allow responsible political planning within a broad and comprehensive framework.[1]

According to the report, several general global population trends can be identified. First of all, the world’s population is continuing to grow, albeit at a declining pace; second, it is growing older, partly due to increased longevity. These general trends generate crucial effects and challenges that differ depending on the context. In some countries, sustained low fertility or emigration is leading to decreasing population sizes. In others, declining fertility “is creating demographic conditions favourable for accelerated economic growth”. Finally, the report confirms the ongoing global increase in longevity and the narrowing gap between rich and poor countries, while also pointing to significant disparities in survival that persist across countries and regions”.[2]

My aim here is to examine some of the data contained in the report in relation to: three important indices, two time points (2020 and 2050), and two macro-regions whose destinies are conditioned by their close interdependence, i.e., Europe and Africa. What changes will these three decades bring? What processes do we need to identify, understand and then govern?

The first index to be evaluated is the total fertility rate, which is the average number of births per woman.

For the period 2020–2025, the report gives this as 1.62 in Europe, as opposed to an average of 4.16 births per woman in Africa. For the period 2045–2050, the European figure remains substantially unchanged (1.72), whereas for Africa it shows a significant reduction (3.07).

The second index to consider is the potential support ratio, which is the number of people aged 25–64 years for every person aged 65 or older; in other words, the number of working age people potentially supporting each non-working individual. In Europe, this ratio was 2.9:1 in 2020, whereas Africa had 10.5 working-age people per individual over 65. Thirty years on, in 2050, the European ratio is expected to fall to 1.7:1; the African one, too, is expected to decline, while nevertheless remaining high: an average of 7.6 people of working age for every person aged 65 or over. The third important index that can help to give us an idea of these two continents’ prospects for social and demographic change is the percentage of the total population aged 65 or over. In 2020, it was 19.1 per cent in Europe, but is projected to rise to a mean of 28.1 per cent by 2050, while the corresponding percentages for sub-Saharan Africa are 3.5 per cent and 5.7 per cent respectively.

What outlook emerges from consideration of the data offered by these indices and from diachronic comparison of these two regions?

What the data tell us is that Europe, over the three decades in question, will see an increase in the elderly, non-productive, dependent section of the population. There will be a drop in the potential support ratio, in other words, a fall in the ratio of working-age to retirement-age people; birth rates, on the other hand, will remain stable. All this translates into an increasing dependent population and a shrinking productive one.

The picture is radically different in Africa, where fertility rates in particular, currently very high, are destined to decrease. Accordingly, African society, especially in the sub-Saharan part of the region, looks set to become characterised by a largely working-age population with a smaller proportion of children. As the document explains: “In most of sub-Saharan Africa, (…) recent reductions in fertility mean that the population at working ages (25 to 64 years) is growing faster than in other age groups, providing an opportunity for accelerated economic growth known as the ‘demographic dividend’.”² This term refers to the potential economic growth that can derive from changes in a country’s population structure: when fertility rates decline, the working-age population increases in proportion to the young, dependent segment. With more members of the workforce and fewer dependent minors, a political community finds itself with a window of opportunity for stimulating and possibly achieving rapid economic growth.[3]

As a first consideration, it can be noted that, against a backdrop of several general trends (global ageing, slowing global population growth, falling fertility rates), different regional patterns emerge.

A second consideration concerns the interdependence between the processes of change mentioned at the start of this piece. Africa, more specifically sub-Saharan Africa, has a demographic dividend that harbours the potential for economic growth. As such, it provides an example of how processes of social and demographic change can stimulate processes of economic change. However, the link between these processes is neither certain nor definitive. The latter can follow the former if — and only if — trends of social change are adequately governed, in other words, only if the right investments are made and strategic social and economic policies are implemented. And this brings us on to the third category of phenomena and processes of change, namely those of an institutional and political nature.

When reflecting upon the question of social and economic potential, there is, in fact, also a political aspect that needs to be considered. Many African states are fragile structures: regimes with low governance capacity, sometimes flanked by non-institutional power structures that wield considerable influence (economic, social and organisational). African society has a problematic relationship with the state, and unless steps are taken to resolve this, it will remain complicated, if not impossible, to invest in the continent’s economic and production potential.

This consideration is a premise for solving a second problem: Africa’s fragmentation. At present, the continent’s states show very little political convergence in terms of social and economic development, and the various political regimes often have very different structures. How can a politically fragmented continent with fragile structures of state possibly govern and positively express the development potential inherent in the demographic dividend?

The aim of these general remarks has been to pave the way for the presentation of an idea, namely that two political leaps will have to be made before this continent’s potential can be realised: there will need to be a quality leap in terms of state structures, and this will have to be followed by a transition to a supranational political system, because the African countries’ currently low level of interdependence leaves scope for interference by third countries, ready to exploit the continent’s differences to their own advantage.

At this point, I believe it is easy to see why the destinies of Europe and Africa can be considered intertwined: Europe is a politically stable and, it is to be hoped, an increasingly integrated continent, yet it is old in demographic terms and harbours no unexpressed economic potential. Africa, on the other hand, is a young continent with enormous latent economic potential; however, it lacks a strong political structure and a homogeneous and resilient social fabric.

It is, I believe, in the face of three specific challenges that these two continents (on account of the complementarity of their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their geographical proximity) find their destinies intertwined. The first is a social challenge, today primarily consisting of the migration crisis. The second is economic: the challenge of promoting the realisation of Africa’s economic potential, while helping it to pursue conscious resource management. The third and final challenge is political, and it concerns the African Union, an international organisation that recently took a hugely important step, adopting the treaty establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which is the largest such area in the world, including 54 of Africa’s 55 states. Inspired by the European Union, this organisation is following in the EU’s footsteps and replicating its institutional framework. The European Union is the most advanced attempt to bring about a profound process of transformation of the global political structure, and thus to address the inability of the nation-state model to withstand the challenges of global interdependence. It is the highest expression of a process of integration that is also being pursued in other parts of the world: we need only think of the of the aforementioned African Union, of Mercosur, and of ASEAN. Arguably, were Europe to completely abandon the objective of political integration, leaving the European project confined to the narrower framework of economic integration, it is likely that Africa would follow suit.

Africa’s capacity to govern these processes of change and to express its economic and social potential therefore depends, in part, on Europe’s ability to be a stimulating partner, able to show how to establish a federal political union. And the route it maps out cannot fail to include the crucial matter of creating a European fiscal capacity, meaning the power to collect resources and spend them in the general interest of the political community. Because this is the only route that can lead to an embryonic form of shared sovereignty at European level, whose realisation will require strong democratic control exercised by an institution representing the citizens of Europe: the federal parliament. For all this to materialise, the European Union must strive to overcome the impasse that sometimes seems to force regional integration processes to remain within a purely economic framework, never allowing them to enter a fully political dimension. Alone, the economic solution is a mere palliative, which will cease to be effective as the interdependencies between social change, economic evolution and politics begin throwing up critical problems that can no longer be resolved.

Andrea Apollonio

[1] Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, 2019 Revision of World Population Prospects, https://population.un.org/wpp/.

[2] Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, World Population Prospects 2019, Highlights, https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2019_Highlights.pdf.

[3] For a more detailed explanation of the “demographic dividend” concept, see the Demographic dividend section of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), website: https://www.unfpa.org/demographic-dividend.

Year LXII, 2020, Single Issue, Page 125

THE PANDEMIC CRISIS AND EUROPE

Scientists have long been predicting the arrival of a virus capable of infecting almost half the world’s population and causing countless deaths, comparing the disastrous effects of such an event to the consequences of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, which killed millions of people in less than two years. In a report published in 2005, the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine drew attention to a large-scale outbreak of a form of avian influenza capable of infecting humans. “Evolution does not function on a knowable timetable”, and influenza variants, especially, are highly unpredictable.[1] This is even truer when, particularly in the setting of today’s globalised world with its dramatically increased levels of movement of goods and people, they become transmissible to humans. It should be pointed out that the Spanish flu epidemic did not originate in Spain. It is simply that the disease, which spread rapidly as a result of the movement of people at the end of WWI, was more widely reported in Spain, which was therefore believed to have been particularly badly hit. In a three-month period in 1918, over 40,000 US soldiers died of it, while police forces struggled to control unrest and riots due to widespread hysteria caused by fear of the disease. At that time, many deaths worldwide were not even officially attributed to the disease, which spread rapidly even to areas as far flung as Russia and South America. Spanish flu is estimated to have killed at least 5 per cent of the Ghanaian population in less than two months, while 20 per cent of that of Western Samoa fell victim to it. Official US and European estimates attribute at least 40-50 million deaths to the effects of the pandemic. Over a two-year period (1918-1919), at least a third of the world’s population was infected and around 100 million people died. In 1917, hygiene movements sprang up both in America and in Europe, but were unable to limit the spread of the disease. It was not until 1933 that a British team finally isolated the virus responsible! Other flu waves followed in the late 1950s and the 1960s, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths in the USA. Later on, in the mid-1970s, the US president of the time, Ford, ordered the production of a vast quantity of anti-flu vaccines, sufficient to vaccinate the entire US population. In the end, however, the anticipated epidemic never materialised, and a kind of protest movement, opposed to government health policies, grew up as a result.

Influenza viruses are known to be harboured by wild animals, especially birds; it is also known that they can jump from these species to farm animals (mammals), and thence to human beings. China, for example, has tens of billions of chickens, 60 per cent of which are raised on small family farms. This facilitates transmission of these viruses. Indeed, when an avian flu virus infects another species — pigs, for example —, it can mutate and become capable of attacking humans. As with many infectious diseases, individuals who have had and recovered from influenza develop antibodies that protect them, for variable periods of time, against further infection by the same pathogen. But, as we see with influenza viruses in particular, the genetic material of a virus frequently undergoes changes with subsequent viral generations. These changes modify the characteristics of the viral particles and make the virus undetectable, at least in part, by the immune system of a previously infected individual. This explains why one year’s flu vaccine can be ineffective the following year, and also why, over time, infections and epidemics tend to occur in cycles, as we saw most recently in the 1990s and the first decade of the XXI century. To date, at least a hundred viral influenzas of avian or animal origin have been identified. And yet in spite of this, the vaccine market in general still accounts for only 2 per cent of the global pharmaceutical market! Even though new technologies offer the promise of greater production capacity, pharmaceutical companies currently seem unable to market more than 300 million vaccine doses annually! On this basis, it is believed that, under current conditions, 30 to 50 per cent of the world population could be infected in the course of an influenza pandemic. The terms of the problem are clear if we consider that the number of doses needed to vaccinate the entire US population against a flu virus is the same as the total number of vaccines produced globally in a year!

In this regard, and also with regard to the production and supply of crucial drugs, Europe is particularly dependent on China and India. Hubei, for example, the Chinese region where the coronavirus threat originated, produces a significant amount of pharmaceutical raw materials: Chinese drug exports to the rest of the world have quadrupled in recent years and are now worth over $120 billion per year. India, in turn, relies on China to meet about two thirds of its internal needs and to support its pharmaceutical exports. As pointed out by Federico Fubini “in the course of this century, India and China have become the back kitchens of the major world brands whose names we see on the packets of the drugs we buy when we are not feeling well. We perceive a drug as ‘German, ‘Italian’ or ‘Swiss’, whereas in actual fact sometimes even the producer itself does not know exactly where, in the world, its ingredients originated. Only the supplier of the supplier of its supplier knows that. But an unforeseen event occurring at the original production site can be enough to upset the entire supply chain, with this effect even trickling down to our local pharmacies.”[2] In the case of Italy, according to the OECD, the added value created in India by medicines subsequently exported from Italy to the rest of the world more than tripled in the seven years from 2005. India and China have de facto become the sources of the big pharmaceutical brands exported and re-exported around the world.

In any case, the greatest challenge facing societies hit by a pandemic is ensuring that their healthcare facilities are able to cope with the sudden and unpredictable mass influx of patients into hospitals. Indeed, any pandemic will test healthcare systems, both globally and locally, to their limits. One need only consider that the World Health Organisation (WHO), despite operating a global pandemic surveillance and monitoring system, has an annual budget of just several million dollars. (Consider that against the budget of the city of New York, which tops $1200 billion!).

It is also important not to make the mistake of thinking that one epidemic is enough to guarantee the immunity of an entire society. In times past, when no remedies were available, recurrent outbreaks in Europe of smallpox, typhus, measles and influenza were linked to poor harvests. However, while epidemics nevertheless managed to leave the European populations partially immunised, the same cannot be said, for example, of those of the Americas. Spanish and Indian sources attribute the fall of the Aztec capital to an explosion of smallpox, while in South America, epidemics of smallpox, measles, typhus, plague, mumps, flu, diphtheria and measles recurred in ten-yearly cycles from 1519 to 1600. In that part of the world, it was not until the XVI century that the populations of the Mesoamerican and Andean areas began growing once again.[3]

While Covid-19 has not (yet) transformed our modern world, there can be no doubt that its impact on technological and social development will be felt for years to come, moreover in a situation of progressive US disengagement on the world stage and evident European powerlessness to offer real alternatives that might lead to the establishment of a new supranational institutional order, at both continental and global level.[4] Increasingly evident, too, is the need to establish a structured system of government at different levels, from local to continental and eventually global.[5] 

***

Today, around 50 per cent of global GDP depends on Asia, whose interdependence with the rest of the world is increasing all the time. Inevitably, therefore, mechanisms like those seen in the past, i.e., the outward expansion of European trade and production into the world,[6] are now recurring today, but this time they are originating from Asia and unfolding on a global scale, thanks also to the growing levels of interdependence in all fields. Species are showing less and less genetic drift, and cultural and geographical distances are reducing. And all of this can be attributed, at the root, not only to the Europeans’ economic, industrial and political expansion, but also, on a biological level, to more intensive farming… and the diseases this brings.[7] 

In the wake of the outbreak and spread of Covid-19 in Europe, the European Commission proposed “stronger crisis preparedness and response for Europe”.[8] This proposal, which is actually more of an appeal to the member states to act correctly and to strengthen surveillance and the exchange of information, is not enough.[9] Coordination of European, national and local policies must instead be institutionalised through federalisation of the system of government. Creating a “European Health Union” would, in fact, entail federal reform of Europe, so as to allow better coordination of the actions of the different levels of government, from continental to local. But the template for such a reform cannot be the centralised model of the Chinese state,[10] which in any case proved unable to stop the spread of the pandemic; nor can we rely on the American model which, although federal, has proved woefully inadequate. Similarly, we need to move away from the current European model, which continues to trapped by intergovernmental mechanisms, national vetoes and local particularisms. In the wake of the international spread of a “Brussels effect” in the economy and trade,[11] it has now become both necessary, and possible, to promote the spread, globally, of a Brussels effect at institutional level, too. On this topic, however, great uncertainty and confusion reign. Not just because of the strength of the resistance of the opponents of European unification and of those determined to protect the, now anachronistic, sovereignty of small states, but also because, even among those who understand the need for deeper political unification, there is still great uncertainty and only timid support. And yet, as even the “timid supporters” acknowledge, the time for a forward leap has come. This whole situation is illustrated by a famous report presented, in the 1970s, to the President of the French Republic. In it, Alain Minc, together with Simon Nora, clearly set out the implications and potential of the imminent computer revolution.[12] While Minc recognised Europe’s potential, he was not yet able to see the need to move decisively towards a European federation, which he called “une construction sui generis”. And this remark confirms the truth of Machiavelli’s famous affirmation in The Prince, namely that, “…that there is nothing more difficult to carry out (...), nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things”. But, as the challenge of Covid-19 now underlines, the time has certainly come to build a new order of things, and to build solidarity into a stable supranational federal institutional framework. 

Franco Spoltore

[1] Laurie Garrett The Next Pandemic, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84 (July-August 2005), pp. 3-23.

[2] Federico Fubini, Sul vulcano. Come riprenderci il futuro in questa globalizzazione fragile, Milan, Longanesi, 2020.

[3] Marcello Carmagnani, L’altro occidente, Turin, Einaudi, 2003, pp. 40-46.

[4] Olivier Zajec, L’ordre international qui vient: “Il faut espérer que des évolutions politiques démocratiques sur le continent européen viendront perturber cette « mort cérébrale » qu’illustre en ce moment la focalisation exceptionnelle sur les résultats électoraux du suzerain américain. Ce réflexe révèle moins l’importance des États-Unis dans l’ordre international que l’impuissance européenne à imaginer une autre solution stratégique effective. Malgré les leçons de l’ère Trump.”, Le monde diplomatique, November 2020.

[5] The US public health chief in 1971 remarked that predicting influenza epidemics is like predicting meteorological changes, because pandemics, like hurricanes can be identified and their developments envisaged. However, epidemics are more unpredictable than hurricanes and the best thing to do is to estimate probabilities. Laurie Garrett, The Next Pandemic, op. cit..

[6] Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. The Ecological Expansion of Europe, ’900-1900, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986: “The breakup of Pangaea was a matter of geology and the stately tempo of continental drift. Our current reconstitution of Pangaea by means of ships and aircraft is a matter of human cuture and the careening, accelerating, breakneck beat of technology. To tell that tale we have to go back not 200 million years, fortunately, by only a million or three.”, p. 12.

[7] Charles Darwin in this autobiography remarked: “Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal”.

[8] Building a European Health Union: Stronger crisis preparedness and response for Europe. https://ec.europa.eu/eip/ageing/news/building-european-health-union-stronger-crisis-preparedness-and-response-europe_en.html.

[9] Ben Hall et al., How coronavirus exposed Europe’s weaknesses, Financial Times, 20/10/20, “When the pandemic struck, many countries were ill-prepared. As a second wave hits, what have they learnt from their early decisions?” https://www.ft.com/content/efdadd97-aef5-47f1-91de-fe02c41a470a.

[10] The Chinese government grasped the gravity of the situation in Wuhan, but was very slow to raise the alarm internationally, waiting weeks before interrupting air traffic, as stated in Federico Fubini, Sul vulcano. Come riprenderci il futuro in questa globalizzazione fragile, op. cit..

[11] Anu Bradford, The Brussels Effect, How the European Union Rules the World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020.

[12] A summary of the 1978 Nora-Minc report can be found at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapport_Nora-Minc. In his book La mondialisation hereuse, Paros, Tribune libre PLON, 1997, Minc wrote: “The European Union is a sui generis construction. From a macroeconomic point of view it will be federal: a currency, a market, a right to competition and a fiscal policy framework. Strategically and diplomatically, it will remain confederal for a long time, even though internally, and without recognisng it, France and Germany are now developing a complementary relationship”, p. 75.

Year LXII, 2020, Single Issue, Page 118

BELARUS, RUSSIA AND THE EUROPEAN UNION

When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, fourteen new, independent republics rose from its ashes. For the new Russia, these former Soviet republics were poised to serve as buffer states both westwards, towards the EU, and eastwards along its extensive Asian borders. One of these new republics, entering the international political stage as a sovereign state for the first time, was Belarus.

In the early 1990s, all these fledgling republics adopted new constitutions and presidential forms of government. The Republic of Belarus, whose Constitution was adopted in 1994, chose to preserve the old Soviet administrative and economic system. Thus, the country’s transition from member of the USSR to independent state did not really change life for its citizens. The year of the new Constitution also brought free elections in Belarus, the only ones to date recognised as such by the Western world. The winner, among the six contenders, was Alexander Lukashenko, who came from the ranks of the CPSU. He has governed the country, as its president, ever since. Lukashenko is known to have boasted, on more than one occasion, that he voted against the decision to dissolve the USSR (he had been a member of the State Duma of the Russian Federation); unsurprisingly, therefore, from the outset, he took steps to confirm an institutional structure reminiscent of the Soviet one. This is a position he has maintained rigidly, in spite of Vladimir Putin frequently remarking that “those who do not regret the passing of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those who would like to see it resurrected have no brain.”

Lukashenko has always remained attached to the model of state and politics that he previously defended in the USSR, particularly as an officer in the Soviet military (1975-1982), latterly also serving as a political instructor. In short, he is a man who was very much part of the Soviet state system.

From the start, Belarus, like most of the other new republics, was careful to maintain close political and economic ties with the new Russia.[1] However, more recent years have seen a weakening of this bond. Indeed, the relationship, increasingly strained, might even have reached breaking point, had it not been for the crisis of August 2020, which put it back on track.
  

Belarus and Putin’s Russia.

Ever since the time of the Soviet Union’s industrial transformation, the region’s most important oil and mineral refineries have been concentrated in Belarus. From here, refined products were, and still are, exported mainly to Russia and the other three republics that, together with Russia and Belarus, form the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).[2]

The economy of Belarus is based mainly on industrial activities linked to mining; the country’s dependence on Russia is due to its need to import crude oil and gas, of which it has none of its own. Belarus’s energy needs are met almost entirely (99 per cent) by imports from Russia, to which it sells back refined products. As a result of this reciprocal arrangement, Belarus and Russia have become complementary countries; accordingly, in Belarus’s 30 years of independence, Lukashenko has not felt the need to alter the industrial structure of the country, which, moreover, has a weak farming industry.

Since the 1990s, this energy dependence has forced these two nations to maintain close relations, and to begin with, Belarus, in particular, benefited greatly from this. Russia, lacking the large refineries necessary to meet the demands of its domestic market, resorted to a form of dumping, cheaply exporting huge amounts of raw materials (oil and gas primarily) to Belarus, which returned the favour by selling refined products to its main trading partner at advantageous prices.

However, this mechanism ultimately had the effect of putting Belarus entirely at the mercy of Russian energy policy, and produced a situation with an inevitable outcome. Up until 2013, with oil costing around 100 dollars a barrel (with peaks of over 110 dollars) and Russia selling it at below-cost prices, the Belarus economy flourished, its GDP increasing by around 7 per cent per year. This trend made it one of the richest of the new post-Soviet republics with the highest per capita income (over 6,500 dollars per year) and the most efficient health system, not to mention a literacy rate of almost 100 per cent. This rosy economic situation made Lukashenko popular, even though he was ruling the country with an iron fist, and silencing opponents through exile or persecution. For years, he was in fact considered Europe’s last dictator.

Russia has long been known to use energy policy as an instrument of power and coercion in its external relations, both with allies and with countries with which it has commercial arrangements in place, such as the EU member states it supplies with gas. However, in late 2013, with the demand for oil falling, and the West introducing sanctions targeting Russian sales of this raw material, it started to become clear that this political use of oil exports was becoming less effective.

Indeed, since 60 per cent of Russia’s GDP is linked to the extraction of oil, gas and other natural resources,^[3] a collapse or sharp dip in oil prices[4] was bound to hit the Russian economy hard; and so, Moscow, to make up the loss of revenue, started to consider revising its pricing policy, which included charging some countries (including Belarus), which had previously enjoyed favourable terms, more for their oil. The event that prompted this change in policy, i.e., the outbreak of the crisis in Ukraine, came in 2013. In November that year, the Ukrainian government’s unexpected decision not to sign the planned Treaty of Association with the European Union triggered a political crisis that rocked the country, and plunged it into a civil war between those in favour of association with the EU, and those who instead wanted greater integration with Russia, which, under Putin, was offering EAEU membership as well as immediate and substantial aid to prop up the disastrous Ukrainian economy. In short, Ukraine was split in two, and there followed rival demonstrations between these factions in many cities (with pro-EU protesters even waving EU flags). This split led the easterly Donbass region, Ukraine’s richest, to proclaim its independence, and it did so with the full support (including military support) of Russia. From then on, a silent war has been playing out in this mainly Russian-speaking region, causing thousands of deaths and the migration, to Russia and Ukraine’s interior, of almost two million citizens. Ukrainian-Russian relations broke down definitively in 2014, when Crimea held an independence referendum with a view to its subsequent integration with Russia. This referendum, which was not recognised by the West, resulted in Crimea’s detachment from Ukraine.[5] Since 2018, a 19 km bridge, built in the space of just over a year, has physically linked the Crimean Peninsula to Russia, and its presence bears witness to the latter’s interest in this region and determination to keep up the pressure on Ukraine’s rulers, notwithstanding the intervening years of USA and EU sanctions.

In fact, as a consequence of Russia’s aggressive policy towards Ukraine, the United States, followed by the EU, applied a series of economic and financial sanctions that, as mentioned above, led Putin’s government, in 2014, to change its raw material pricing policy. As an effect of the new, higher prices, the Belarus GDP began to fall and inflation to rise, and these trends encouraged a revival of opposition to the regime. The period 2015-2017 brought protests in Belarus, which were repressed with violence. Moreover, in 2015, new presidential elections were held, which delivered Lukashenko, re-elected with over 90 per cent of the votes, his fifth consecutive mandate. In a half-hearted attempt to quell the protests, some timid liberal reforms were introduced, while nevertheless leaving 70 per cent of economic activity in the country under strict state control.

With the crisis in Ukraine in full swing, the protests mounted in Belarus during that period did nothing to change Western policies or attitudes: the aim of US foreign policy, supported by the EU, was still to weaken Russia. This indeed explains why, in the period 2014-2015, the USA invited Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia to join NATO, a move that had the effect of further entrenching Russia’s position. Although the fall of the Berlin Wall had, symbolically, marked the end of the Cold War, fear and wariness of Russia had remained woven into US foreign policy, so much so that the Americans even managed to persuade all the former Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO, too. At the same time, the European Union displayed an openness towards these same countries, embracing them as new member states and thus taking its membership to 28 countries. Russia responded to these initiatives by forging ever stronger military and economic ties with China, and in 2015 Putin’s regional market (EAEU) was launched. The EAEU member states also created the Eurasian Fund for Stabilisation and Development (EFSD),[6] to be used as a source of financial aid in the event of internal or international crises. Under this scheme, Belarus applied for a USD 500 million loan to help its finances, but it should be pointed out that a good 300 million of this was earmarked to settle old debts, linked to the supply of gas, contracted with Gazprom, the main Russian gas and oil provider. The granting of this loan coincided with Lukashenko’s refusal to accept one offered by the IMF, conditional upon the implementation, in the country, of restrictions designed to contain the spread of coronavirus infections. Lukashenko is among the national leaders who deny the coronavirus threat.[7]
  

Belarus and the EU.

The EU’s relations with Belarus highlight, once again, a more general problem linked to the stance the bloc should adopt towards Russia.

As mentioned, Lukashenko’s latest and umpteenth re-election as president triggered protests that were suppressed with unprecedented violence. The EU responded to the repression by expressing its indignation and offering full solidarity to the protesters and opponents who were imprisoned or forced to flee the country. As on previous occasions, the EU did not recognise the legitimacy of the election; this time, however, rather than merely issuing a simple statement of condemnation, it sanctioned and implemented restrictive measures against members of Lukashenko’s entourage held to be involved, yet without touching the president directly. This response, albeit dictated by the circumstances, illustrated the considerable and grave political weakness of the EU.

Considering that Lukashenko has ruled Belarus, with an iron fist, since 1994, periodically being returned to power through elections that each time have been condemned as illegitimate, the question we must surely ask is, how can this be allowed to happen in a country that borders with Europe? In actual fact, the situation in Belarus is common to a number of former Soviet republics: Azerbaigian, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Tagikistan have all had the same presidents since the 1990s, and also seen a series of sham elections. Moreover, this list should also include Russia, given that Putin, switching between the roles of prime minister and president, has governed the country since 1999, and, following the constitutional referendum held there last July, could continue to do so until 2030. As Putin himself made clear to the Financial Times in 2019,[8] liberal democracy cannot be adapted to Russia and its former republics. In these countries, therefore, elections and referenda serve only to give a semblance of popular legitimacy to what are, in fact, authoritarian governments.

Attacking Lukashenko politically and directly, demanding his resignation, would make it necessary to do the same with Putin. The latter, after initially failing to comment on Lukashenko’s sixth re-election, eventually opted to confirm his unlimited support for his ally. Relations between the two had soured in recent years after Russia, hit by the Western economic sanctions mentioned earlier, had increased its raw material prices, plunging Belarus into recession, and causing it to record a drop in GDP and a sharp decline in wages (back to 2010 levels), and to run up ever-increasing debts with Gazprom.[9] In 2019, Putin had suggested that Belarus could be merged with Russia, becoming to all effects, a part of it, a proposal that Lukashenko rejected with indignation. The recent popular protests, however, saw Lukashenko moving back into Russia’s orbit: the president forcefully accused the EU and the US of fomenting the protests and riots, even to the point of exacerbating the KGB-led repression.[10] However, this show of strength failed to stop the demonstrations in the country. These popular protests and the accounts given by opponents of the regime who have fled abroad should be reason enough to prompt the EU to step in and act in a mediating, peacekeeping capacity, thereby avoiding the mistakes made in response to the crisis in Ukraine, the price for which is still being paid today. This role could be particularly significant, given that the US has maintained a low profile vis-à-vis the situation in Belarus. Indeed, the US administration’s response to the police violence has been confined to general statements of condemnation and talk of sanctions. Nothing more. The crisis in Belarus coincided with the US presidential campaign, during which foreign policy matters were not key issues either for Trump or for his challenger, Biden.

The protest demonstrations in Belarus have been staged entirely under the Belarus flag, with the protestors seeking neither a break with Russia, nor closer links with the EU. In Ukraine, on the other hand, the country was clearly split between two opposing factions, and saw the US, fully backed by the EU, supporting a clear break with Russia, and even proposing that the country should join NATO. The events in Ukraine seem to have induced the Belarus protesters to look for a “national way” in order to avoid either siding with or opposing either the West or Russia. Such a route would allow the country to play a bridging role between East and West, an opportunity that was missed in the case of Ukraine.

Since the end of the Second World War, a key, and consistent, aim of US foreign policy, under both Republican and Democrat presidents, has been to weaken the USSR, and subsequently Russia. This choice, legitimate (given America’s role as a global superpower) and supported by Europe has had the desired effect: US foreign policy weakened the USSR, and has perhaps weakened Russia. However, it has also brought the EU face to face with all its limits and left it economically fragile and in a position of political subjection. The EU could potentially play a mediating role between East and West, but in order to do so it would have to have its own foreign and defence policy, as well as its own energy policy — one that would not (in the case of some EU countries) leave it dependent on Russian gas.[11] However, not having these instruments, the EU, in order to show the world that it has its own voice, can at present only issue condemnations and timid sanctions against some of Lukashenko’s men. The fact is, as long as the EU continues to limit itself to supporting US foreign policy, the credibility of its declarations will remain weak and its actions ineffective, as the Ukrainian situation has sadly shown. Credibility has to be built on and supported by real power, and this is what the EU lacks.

The popular protests in Belarus thus seem unlikely to lead to a democratic outcome, but rather a worsening of the repression, also due to the interventions in support of the regime on the part of Russia, which is keen to avoid having hostile states on its borders.[12] Unfortunately, as things stand, it seems impossible to imagine a scenario in which dialogue with Russia does not inevitably lead to open confrontation, replicating what happened in Ukraine. To change this, Europe needs to be able to act autonomously, and avoid limiting itself to issuing formal declarations of condemnation that unfortunately do nothing to advance the cause of the Belarus people seeking democracy. Debate at the imminent Conference on the Future of Europe is expected to focus on the question of how to lend credibility to EU policies. There is only one possible answer: Europe must have a government answerable to its Parliament for actions taken in the context of its own foreign and defence policy. Otherwise, without power, there will continue to be no credibility.

Stefano Spoltore

[1] The three Baltic states are the exceptions to this rule, having chosen to follow a different path after gaining their independence. In 2004 they became EU and NATO member states.

[2] The five members of the EAEU are the Russian Federation, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (or the Kyrgyz Republic). Putin, in 2011, took the initiative of promoting a regional market, which came into force in 2015.

[3] Source: www.ispionline.it, 2 December 2019.

[4] The price per barrel of Brent crude oil fell down from USD 108 in 2013 to 43 in 2016. It rose to 71 in 2018, before falling to 64 in 2019. In September 2020, because of the pandemic, it dropped to 41 dollars.

[5] For more on the crisis in Ukraine, cf. Stefano Spoltore, Ukraine Caught Between East and West, The Federalist, 56 (2014), pp. 55-66.

[6] The charter capital of the Eurasian Development Bank amounts to 7 billion dollars. The EFSD member states hold the following shares in this capital: Russia 65.97 per cent, Kazakhistan 32.99 per cent, Belarus 0.99 per cent, Tagikistan 0.03 per cent, Armenia 0.01 per cent, and Kyrgyzstan 0.01 per cent.  

[7] Lukashenko recommends treating Covid-19 with a sauna and a bottle of vodka. Even though he himself has been ill, he has called fear of coronavirus a dangerous psychosis, Il Messaggero, 9 May 2020.

[8] Financial Times, 27 June 2019.

[9] These debts with Gazprom were paid off with a loan from the EFSD, which is financed mainly (over 60 per cent) by Russia. The funds lent were thus returned to Russia’s coffers.

[10] Lukashenko’s ideological attachment to the old USSR is illustrated by the fact that, after independence, the initials of the Soviet state police were not changed.

[11] The Czech Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria are totally dependent on gas supplies from Russia. The other EU countries import, on average, 25 per cent of their gas from Russia. Cf. Il Sole 24 ORE, 24 April 2015 and www.insideover.com, 31 October 2019.

[12] Another former Soviet republic currently caught up in strife is Kyrgyzstan, a small country squashed between Russia and China. For the past 30 years, this country has seen repeated political struggles involving armed groups opposing the presidency. The latest elections, clearly rigged, have rekindled the armed struggle. Cf. Corriere della sera, 29 October, 2020. Elsewhere, tensions have resurfaced between Armenia and Azerbaijan (supported by Turkey) over control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Year LXII, 2020, Single Issue, Page 107

MERCOSUR: A FUTURE IN THE BALANCE

In August 2017, the former Uruguayan president, Luis Alberto Lacalle, interviewed in the Argentinian newspaper La Nación, declared “Mercosur is in agony and no longer good for anything”.[1] In 1991, the same Lacalle, as president of Uruguay, had, together with the presidents of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, signed the Treaty of Asunción that created Mercosur. As repeatedly emphasised in the preparatory documents to that founding treaty, the original intention had been to pursue a project of economic and political integration along the lines of the European Union. But now, three decades on, Mercosur is in the throes of a crisis so deep that, also in view of the events of recent years, it can be feared to have run completely off course. To understand what has happened, and is happening, in that part of South America, it is necessary to analyse a series of issues, and to do so without forgetting, crucially, that it was not until the mid-1980s that democracy first made an appearance in the region. The creation of Mercosur served to consolidate the economic and political development of several young democracies, but in recent years, resurgences of nationalistic sentiment, populism and military nostalgia are undermining this integration project. 
 

The Parlasur.

Back in December 2005, the Mercosur Common Market Council (CMC) drew up a roadmap with the objective of arriving at direct elections of the Mercosur Parliament (Parlasur). It was envisaged that, in the first phase, sessions of the Parliament would be attended by elected members of the respective national parliaments. In accordance with the planned timeline, the first meeting of the Parlasur took place in 2006. Elections by universal suffrage, to elect the Parlasur members directly, were meant to take place in a second phase, specifically in 2014.[2] However, even though this proposal had been renewed in 2011 by the Mercosur Summit of Heads of State, in April 2019, the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, in a joint declaration, announced the decision to drop the plan for direct elections. By postponing the project indefinitely, they effectively abandoned the idea of a parliament directly elected by the peoples of the region.[3]

Each Mercosur state had, and still has, 18 representatives in the Mercosur Parliament, who meet once a month at the Parlasur headquarters in Montevideo. Under the terms of its 2005 proposal, the CMC wanted to move towards direct elections by universal suffrage, along the lines of the method used for electing the European Parliament, which had been introduced in 1979. But thorny problems immediately arose, the first being the number of representatives each state should be granted. Were this to be decided on a simple proportional basis, taking into account solely the size of the population, Brazil would immediately have an absolute majority in any voting scenario. Having more than 200 million inhabitants, it is far more populous than Argentina (45 million), Paraguay (7 million), Uruguay (4 million) and Venezuela (33 million). It was therefore necessary to find a formula that would allow all citizens to be represented, yet without handing any single state a ready-made majority. While the experts in electoral systems carefully analysed the various options, the politicians repeatedly deferred the question of Parlasur elections. When an agreement was finally reached on the number of MPs each country would be entitled to have (43 for Argentina, 75 for Brazil, 18 each for Paraguay and Uruguay, and 32 for Venezuela, making a total of 186), there arose the problem of the need to draw up, within each state, an ad hoc electoral law and create new electoral colleges. In the end, only Paraguay actually wrote its own electoral law and proceeded with the election, in 2018, of its 18 representatives. But, together with the aforementioned decision to drop the plan for direct elections, it was also decided to retain the current structure of the Mercosur Parliament, whose members therefore still have a dual (national and supranational) mandate.

The real problem with all this is that the Parlasur’s powers have remained purely formal. Over the years, the Parliament has never assumed legislative power or been assigned a supervisory role vis-à-vis the Summit of Heads of State, and as a result even its directly elected representatives (those from Paraguay) have admitted to feeling futile, arguing that while the Parliament needs to be endowed with “legislative and control powers, the key characteristics of a legislative body, [...] these powers are currently assigned to the Summit of Heads of State, therefore our role is totally useless”.[4] This state of affairs is perhaps not surprising, given that the Protocolo Constitutivo of the new parliament gave it only purely formal and consultative functions;[5] that said, it should also be added that, within the Parlasur, no group of parliamentarians has ever come together to speak out and fight for real powers. The situation that has evolved is well illustrated by the words of the Paraguayan foreign minister, Castiglioni, who declared that abandoning the idea of direct elections had been necessary in order to work out a better way of organising the activities of the Parlasur, “...even though there are [still] no plans to do so”.[6]

Although the events of recent years culminated in the drastic decision to rule out direct elections of the Parlasur, this outcome must also be attributed to the profound divisions that have opened up between the member states on the future of Mercosur, with enlargement of the bloc to other countries leading to serious disagreements within the Summit. Nevertheless, it has been made quite clear that sovereignty in the region remains firmly in the hands of the single member states, as the events of 2019 indeed confirm.
  

Venezuela’s Accession to Mercosur.

Mercosur, just like the EU, is open to the possibility of accepting new members. In 2007, Venezuela became the first new country to apply to join the bloc, following its decision, the previous year, to withdraw from the Andean Community of Nations (CAN).[7] Before a prospective new Mercosur member state can become a full member, however, a transition period is envisaged, during which it is required to attend meetings and sessions of the Summit and Parliament as an observer. Venezuela was formally granted admission to Mercosur in July 2012, but its membership triggered a fierce dispute between the member states that, even today, remains unresolved. In brief, Paraguay opposed Venezuela’s membership from the outset, arguing that the anti-US policy, economic policy and social policy pursued by Venezuelan President Chavez went against the founding principles of Mercosur. Since a new country can become an active member of Mercosur only if this transition is approved unanimously by the parliaments of the member states, Paraguay’s opposition should (and would) have made Venezuela’s entry into the bloc impossible, had it not been for another dramatic turn of events the previous month. In June 2012, Paraguay had been temporarily suspended from Mercosur under the terms of the trade bloc’s Protocolo democratico, which allows member states, through a unanimous vote of their parliaments, to temporarily suspend any state accused of violating democratic principles. In Paraguay’s case the decision was prompted by an internal political crisis that saw President Lugo forcibly removed from office in the midst of fierce and widespread protests over his re-election.[8] Because it was decided to hold the vote on Venezuela’s permanent membership during the period of Paraguay’s suspension, Venezuela was able to join the bloc. By the time Paraguay was readmitted at the end of 2012, Venezuela’s membership was already a fait accompli. The presence of Venezuela in Mercosur immediately sowed deep discord and divisions, not least because of the divisive figure of its president, Chavez, whose anti-USA stance and frequent public outbursts fueled domestic foreign policy positions that were not aligned with those of the other member states, with the exception of Uruguay. Following Chavez’s death in 2013, and the crisis that blew up in Venezuela in 2017, leading the Caribbean nation to the brink of civil war, it was decided, again through recourse to the aforementioned Protocolo democratico mechanism, that Venezuela should be suspended from Mercosur.[9] But just as Venezuela’s admission to the community had been decided in the face of opposition, its suspension, too, was not straightforward: indeed, it took a joint intervention by the presidents of Argentina and Brazil to secure Uruguay’s agreement to this move. Uruguay believed that a US-led international conspiracy against Maduro (the new President of Venezuela) was under way, and held out for several months before finally bowing to the pressure from the two regional powers.Enlargement continues to be at the heart of political debate between the Mercosur member states, as indeed does the more general question of the region’s foreign policy, especially given the imminent entry of Bolivia and Chile. Barring new unforeseen events and delays, these two countries, currently assigned observer status, will become full members within the next two years.
 

The Next Countries in Line to Join Mercosur: Bolivia and Chile.

For both Bolivia and Chile, 2019 was a year of dramatic strife. It brought public protests and fierce clashes between demonstrators and police during which Bolivian president Morales was forced to flee the country in an attempt to quell the anger of crowds besieging the presidential palace and, in Chile, a military-enforced curfew following attempts to attack President Piñera.All this paints a very bleak and frightening picture with regard to the future of these two nations whose histories include repeated coups (in Bolivia 150 in just under 200 years) and, in the case of Chile (under Pinochet), a harsh dictatorship. On examination of the tragic events, sparked by completely different issues, that have taken place in these two countries in recent times, there emerges an important new element to consider, namely the role, also different in each of them, of the armed forces.The protests in Bolivia were triggered by the attempts of its president, Morales, to stand for an unconstitutional fourth term of office. Morales, wanting the Constitution changed precisely so that he might stand again, managed to obtain a referendum on the question. Although he lost the referendum, he was not deterred, and took his case to the Supreme Court. The Court, disregarding the referendum result, declared that Morales could stand for election, because to deny him the possibility to do so would amount to a contravention of the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual. It should be noted that the Supreme Court was comprised mainly of judges close to Morales’ party. At this point, the streets and squares across the entire country exploded with protesters demanding Morales’ immediate resignation in the name of defence of the Constitution. The most important aspect to underline here is that Morales, during his years as president, had actually enjoyed broad popular support thanks to his successes in the economic field, which had resulted in a general improvement in living conditions throughout the country. Nevertheless, his extreme attempts to hold on to power angered the people, who, contrary to similar situations in the past, this time found support in the military, to the point that the head of the armed forces put pressure on Morales to leave the country in order to avoid further public unrest. That the army should champion the democratic constitution in this way was certainly a novel turn of events, not only for Bolivia but for the region as a whole. Meanwhile, Uruguay took a stand in support of Morales, and in this regard found itself isolated within Mercosur.[10] In Chile, too, the role of the army in the face of public protests was significant. Again, the protesters wanted constitutional reform, but in this case aimed at bringing the pension system, health and education back under state control. During the years of the dictatorship, Chile had become a hyper-liberal state and these sectors had been privatised along US lines. Application of this model had, over the years, had serious consequences, putting an acceptable minimum pension beyond the reach of most people, and making a university education inaccessible to the less well-off, to say nothing of universal healthcare. The government responded to the protests by calling in the army, in addition to the police, and imposing a curfew. To many people, the violence that followed looked very much like the start of a new dictatorship, and the international community, mindful of the events that preceded the 1973 coup d'état in Chile, immediately demanded a return to democratic rules. Faced with this pressure, the government was forced to call off the army and negotiate with the protesters. In short, on this occasion the international community was quick to respond to the first episodes of army violence, and succeeded in defusing the situation. Nevertheless, the attempted military intervention did garner some support from Brazil, under its newly elected president Bolsonaro, a former army captain.
  

Bolsonaro: President of “Brasil Primero”.

Several years ago, the extensive Lava Jato investigation into institutional corruption, a political scandal involving three former presidents, caused consternation and anger in Brazil, fueling popular protest and also a desire for a new leadership, in the Trump mould. Accordingly, Jair Bolsonaro won the 2019 presidential election on the back of a strong Brasil Primero message. At the UN Climate Change Conference that same year, he reiterated his position. In the very days that saw the world’s attention focused on catastrophic fires devouring the rainforest, he declared that “the Amazon is Brazil’s”, and that it is Brazil’s business what it does with it. The provocative and often arrogant tone of Bolsonaro’s public declarations[11] is disconcerting, as indeed are his frequent changes of opinion regarding Brazil’s role within Mercosur. During his election campaign, he repeatedly stressed that Brazil needed to be free to stipulate bilateral trade agreements outside the framework of the Mercosur agreements and the constraints they impose. Given Bolsonaro’s constant criticism of it, some commentators suggested that he might even pull Brazil out of the bloc.[12] Yet in spite of all this, and just as his criticisms were stoking political debate among the other member states, in June 2019, on the occasion of a bilateral meeting with the then Argentinian president Macri, Bolsonaro unexpectedly proposed creating a single Mercosur currency: the peso-real. The Argentinian president was taken unawares, having had no advance warning of the proposal, nevertheless he expressed an interest in it. Meanwhile, the Central Bank of Brazil, in a public statement, declared that no studies were under way to support such a project.[13] Therefore, most people took the proposal as just another of Bolsonaro’s typical impromptu declarations.In actual fact, back in 1997, the National Economic Development Bank of Brazil had already formulated a common currency project for the nations of the area, envisaging its implementation by 2012. Then, too, the intention had been to follow Europe’s example, in that instance by replicating the European single currency project that, in 2001, had led to the birth of the euro.[14] However, the idea was strongly opposed by Argentina, then led by Menem, who preferred dollarisation as a means of stabilising his country’s disastrous finances.[15] Bolsonaro’s proposal nevertheless started a debate on the opportuneness of creating a common currency within Mercosur. In general, nothing was ruled out, although all the institutions in the area adopted a very cautious stance on the matter. In the debate between economists and the member states’ central banks, it was underlined that this was, in any case, a project that would necessarily take a long time and have to proceed by gradual steps, as Europe’s experience had shown. Alberto Graña, president of the Central Bank of Uruguay, for example, made this clear when he said “… we have seen the difficulties [in the process] that led to the birth of the euro and the difficulties [the member states still] have, given their different fiscal policies […]. Objectively, thinking about a common currency means, among other things, [thinking about] alignment of macroeconomic, monetary and fiscal policies […] it will take time to analyse the path to follow in order to sustain this project”.[16] Bolsonaro, having raised this issue so unexpectedly, forgot it equally quickly, his attention being taken up, instead, with the presidential election campaign in Argentina, a debate he had waded into with some strong declarations. He even went so far as to claim that Brazil would leave Mercosur should the outgoing Argentinian president, Macri, fail to win another term, since Brazil would never be able to work alongside a Communist, which is how he viewed the Peronist candidate, Fernandez. At the end of 2019, Fernandez was elected President of Argentina. At this point, Bolsonaro, behaving as he had already done in other similar circumstances, initially made the new president the focus of some strong attacks, before then changing tack and underlining the need for close cooperation with Argentina, not least because, as some of his closest aides will have reminded him, Brazil and Argentina are each other’s main economic partner.[17]
  

The EU-Mercosur Trade Agreement.

In the summer of 2019, the outgoing president of the European Commission, Junker, announced, with great satisfaction, the reaching of a trade agreement with Mercosur. After almost 20 long years of negotiations, this promised to be a historic deal — “promised to be” because it was actually just a draft agreement, still needing to be discussed and ratified (a lengthy process) by all the member countries of each of the two blocs. The news immediately galvanized into action the opposing lobbies on both sides of the Atlantic. We refer in particular, to the farming lobby in the EU and the metalworking industry in South America. Under the terms of the draft agreement, 91% of the tariffs applied by Mercosur on goods coming from the EU would be eliminated and, at the same time, the EU would cut 92% of the tariffs it charges on goods entering Europe from Mercosur. The latter would mainly be agri-food products, while most of the Europe’s exports to Mercosur would be related to the metalworking sector, especially the automotive industry. The draft deal has, in fact, been criticised particularly vociferously by the automotive sector in Argentina and Brazil, since the reduction in tariffs, albeit to be phased in gradually over a period of seven years from the agreement’s entry into force, would obviously affect its industries. The agreement would encourage imports, into the Mercosur area, of luxury cars from Germany and Italy, both of which already have industrial operations in the region that, however, produce only commercial vehicle or mid-range car models. The lower tariffs would also affect local producers of agricultural machinery and car parts.But the strongest opposition to the draft agreement has come from Europe, where Austria has already said that it has no intention of signing any agreement, given President Bolsonaro’s refusal to acknowledge the dramatic Amazonian deforestation emergency linked to the need for new pasture land.[18] Other arguments raised against the lowering of tariffs on agri-food imports concern the issue of food safety: the standards and controls, particularly veterinary controls, required in the Mercosur area do not match those that European farmers are expected to meet. Furthermore, many crops in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay are treated with genetically modified products and used for both human consumption and animal feed: practices prohibited in the European Union.[19] All in all, the future of this trade agreement remains uncertain, not least because all the member states of both blocs have, for the moment, suspended talks due to the pandemic. It is important to note that the agreement can come into force only with the unanimous agreement of all the countries involved, and therefore that it would be necessary to work on some of the national governments, given that the Austrian Parliament has already voted against the agreement, and France and Ireland have expressed markedly negative positions.

With regard to Mercosur’s pursuit of trade agreements, there is, however, another gathering cloud. The Argentinian government has said that it intends to veto any possible trade agreements with individual third-party nations as long as the debate on the content of the EU-Mercosur draft agreement is ongoing. In fact, trade agreements are currently being discussed between Mercosur and Canada, South Korea and India. Argentina considers the proposed deal with South Korea, in particular, to be dangerous, as it would put the automotive industry at risk and encourage imports of Korean brands; it is therefore firmly opposed to it. These trade agreements, too, to enter into force, would have to be unanimously ratified by all the member states. Although Argentina’s firm positions on this issue made it look as though it was this country’s turn to want to leave Mercosur, Buenos Aires has issued statements rejecting such an idea. It was actually the Brazilian vice premier, Mourao, who calmed the waters, highlighting the importance of keeping debate within Mercosur alive in order to guarantee and protect the interests of every one of its member states.[20]
 

A Future in the Balance.

The issues at the heart of political debate within Mercosur are the same ones encountered and addressed by Europeans and federalists in their fight for greater EU integration. Enlargement, the role of the region’s parliament, and that of a common currency are topics whose exploration could lead to a strong federalist initiative also in the Rio de La Plata region of South America. As we very well know, European integration is a process that has known periods of impasse or tension between the member states,[21] but also periods of great drive and energy, as well as important milestones, like the direct election of the European Parliament and the creation of the single currency. Throughout it all, France and Germany have always played a key role, just as Argentina and Brazil do in Mercosur. But what would happen, in Europe, were the French president or German chancellor to show each other the kind of disdain that Bolsonaro has shown the new Argentinian president? The EU would risk disintegration. Although in Mercosur, for the moment, there is no question of this happening, there are, nevertheless, clear signs of a general malaise: the crisis in Venezuela (still a member state but currently suspended); the situation in Bolivia (whose entry into Mercosur is at risk following the internal crisis that is impacting its relations with the bloc’s member states); the desertion of the project for direct elections of the Parlasur; and Brazil’s exceptionalist ambitions (Brasil primero), illustrated by its claims that it should be free to enter into bilateral agreements outside the framework of Mercosur. Furthermore, there is the question, herein merely raised, of the role being played, in the Brazilian government, by men with a military background. Bolsonaro is, as already mentioned, a former army officer, and on a number of occasions has celebrated the role played by dictatorships in the history of his country. The president aside, numerous representatives of the armed forces have been assigned ministerial roles in Brazil: the vice president and security minister (respectively, Mourao and Heleno) are both former generals, the defence minister (Azevedo) is a general, the science and technology minister (Pontes) is a former fighter pilot, and the secretary of government (dos Santos Cruz) a former general. As we have said, democracy in Brazil, as in the rest of the sub-continent, is still a very new phenomenon; having said that, even the EU has leaders that support illiberal democracy (in Hungary) or alter the Constitution to their own advantage (in Poland), restricting freedom of expression. Can these cases be taken as signs of a real threat to the democratic institutions and, with them, the ongoing processes of integration in Europe? Does the myth of national sovereignty hold greater sway than the desire for integration of peoples? These are profound issues that go beyond the scope of this short essay, but there is, nevertheless, one fact that needs to be underlined: the birth of Mercosur was possible precisely because of all that Europe had done from the Treaties of Rome onwards — the EU was its reference model. For this reason, it now falls to Europe to send out, once again, a very clear and strong message, this time by finally achieving federal reform of its institutions and by equipping itself with a government. But for these things to happen in the EU, a core group will need to succeed in overcoming the idea that national sovereignty is sacrosanct. In so doing, it would send out an important message not just to the rest of Europe, but also to the region, in South America, that has long watched the European Union, and continues to do so. It would also serve as an extraordinary response to all those Chilean resistance fighters who, in the midst of their street battles, have been known to sing the EU anthem, Schiller's Ode to Joy, which looks forward to a day when all men will finally be brothers again.[22] 

Stefano Spoltore

[1] Boletin Parlamento Mercosur (BPM), La Nación, Buenos Aires, 8 August 2017.

[2] Cf. Consejo del Mercado Común, Protocolo Constitutivo del Parlamento del Mercosur, 8 December 2005.

[3] BPM, www.ultimahora.com, Asunción and La Nación, Buenos Aires, 21 April 2019.

[4] BPM, ABC, Asunción, 24 November 2019.

[5] Art. 4 Protocolo, op. cit.

[6] BPM, www.ultimahora.com, Asunción, 21 and 23 April 2019.

[7] The Andean Community of Nations (CAN) comprised Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Venezuela, until the latter decided to withdraw.

[8] On the Protocolo democratico and the crisis in Paraguay see also: S. Spoltore, Brasile e Argentina al bivio nel Mercosur, Il Federalista, 54 n. 3 (2012), p. 160.

[9] S. Spoltore, Venezuela e Mercosur: la difficile via verso la democrazia, Il Federalista, 59 n.2 (2017), p. 169.

[10] The Parlasur, in a statement issued on 11 November 2019, condemned the persecution of President Morales, forced into exile, and the intervention of the military both in Bolivia and Chile.

[11] Such as when he referred to Brazil’s native Indians as almost human beings, remarked that dictatorship had been good for Brazil, that climate change is not real, that coronavirus is little more than influenza and that many people had died in Italy because it was a country of “old folk”. And this is to say nothing of his anti-gay remarks.

[12] BPM, www.perfil.com, El brexit de Latinoamérica: la posible retirada del Brasil del Mercosur, Buenos Aires, 14 September 2019.

[13]  BPM, M24digital, Moneda común del Mercosur no es estrategia, es una irresponsabilidad, Buenos Aires, 18 June 2019.

[14] L’Espresso, 29 May 1997.

[15] Cf. S. Spoltore, Dollarisation in Latin America and the Mercosur Crisis, The Federalist, 43 n.2 (2001), p. 129.

[16] A similar tone was adopted by José Cantero, president of the Central Bank of Paraguay. BPM, El Observador, Montevideo, 7 August 2019.

[17] A. Mori, Argentina: debito e crisi sociale, due azzardi per Fernández, Ispionline.it, 2 December 2019, https://www.ispionline.it/it/pubblicazione/argentina-debito-e-crisi-sociale-due-azzardi-fernandez-24542. Cf. also: M. Rapoport, E. Madrid, Argentina Brasil de rivales a aliados, Capital Intelectual, Buenos Aires, 2011.

[18] Commercio, dopo Francia e Irlanda anche l'Austria boccia l'intesa Ue-Mercosur, Agrisole, Milan, 23 September 2019.

[19] Cf. UE Mercosur: l'Accordo della discordia, Agronotizie, 27 August 2019. The objections of Europe’s farmers were practically unanimous across all 27 member states.

[20] BPM, Clarin, Buenos Aires, 14 May 2020.

[21] One might think, for example, of recent debates over aid to be granted to states in difficulty owing to the coronavirus crisis.

[22] A. Dorfman, Exorcising Pinochet: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet. U.S., Seven Stories Press, 2003. According to this account, a crowd of 70,000 was present at the national stadium in Santiago on 12 March 1990, where they listened to “Ode to Joy” (joining in with the chorus) played by the Symphony Orchestra of Chile to celebrate the return to democracy.